Robert Hood

Fragments of a Broken Land: Valarl Undead


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light reflected in sharp yellow patterns from the wet stonework. He heard someone, probably his mother, moving about below.

      Unwilling to risk communication at that moment, he dressed and left the house silently. The Skywave lay less than mid-firmament northward, its long scar of crackling energy sizzling the blue expanse white. Scattered clouds created bands of shadow. Around him, Koerpel-Na hummed—but suddenly it wasn’t his city. It seemed an alien place, its densely packed building-squares, its park lands, and bustling streets and markets as bizarre as anything that haunted his dreams. More so. At that moment, it was as though the strange landscape that Bellarroth trod was more familiar, more a part of him, than this place where he lived his real life.

      He trudged across the park behind his mother’s house, then over the central Dehum-Rewi thoroughfare just north of the Temple of Shaa-Derthperrit. That building’s imposing marble façade was expressionless and silent. A path wound past the Temple’s vegetable plots and several large storage buildings, ending among a tussle of bushes and windblown trees on a small cliff overlooking the harbor. Tashnark sat at the edge and stared across the deep blue water, which only gave way to an illusory strip of gray land far off on the other side of the bay. Several merchant ships and a scattering of smaller craft glided over the choppy surface. Sometimes all Tashnark wanted to do was get on one of those ships and travel to somewhere else. He didn’t know where.

      Later, when his stomach told him he should eat, he headed back the way he’d come, dodging the produce carts going to and coming from the docks along the main street. His mother waited for him.

      “Are you ill, Tashnark?” she asked. She was a small, compact woman, absurdly slight considering her son was so large. Tashnark looked at the delicate curves of her cheek bones and the fragility of her arms and wondered how the two of them could be related.

      “Bad dreams last night,” he said.

      “Again? Won’t you tell me about them?”

      He put his arm around her shoulders, which were on a level with his chest, and squeezed gently. It was an affectionate gesture but also dismissive. “They’re nothing,” he commented.

      She wouldn’t let it go. “Dreams are never nothing. You need to understand them.”

      He moved away, toward the kitchen. “I know what they mean.” She followed him; he could hear the skittish whisper of her feet on the boards. “My mind’s restless. I think I’ve been here, doing nothing much, far too long.”

      “We’ve all told you that.” She pushed past him as he grabbed a loaf of bread, taking it from him. The bread quickly became sandwiches filled with cold meat and a cold vegetable stew she’d obviously made sometime during the night before. She glanced up at him, her eyes hard and unforgiving among her fragile features. “I don’t want to lose you, Tashnark, but you mustn’t be consumed by this City’s essential wastefulness.”

      “You want me to be a scholar, like you. But it’s not in me.”

      “I want you to find out where you belong, that’s all.”

      He took the sandwiches and retreated to the hearth room, where the atmosphere was closed off and shadowy. She didn’t follow him. No fire was lit, but he sat in front of the hearth anyway, as though the memory of flame could warm him in places the real fire left cold.

      CHAPTER TWO

      ANCESTRAL CALL

      i.

      The alley was a dead end.

      At first, the inebriated fat man hadn’t noticed this fact. Shock had cleared some of the fuzziness from his head, but not enough to neutralize a full afternoon’s drinking. He’d stumbled upon the opening and plunged in, desperately hoping it could hide him from his pursuer. The dagger he clutched in his hand had seemed little defense in the open street, but the alley’s darkness reassured him.

      Echoes of his padding feet, their rhythm fractured by a weakness in his left leg, came back to him from the rough brick walls to either side. By the time he realized his way was blocked, it was too late to hide. He glanced back. A dark shape slid toward him against the lighter background of the outer street. “What do you want?” Zeth-han cried. His gilded robe rustled loudly, his sandals scraped on the rocky dirt of the road, but the shadow said nothing. It was almost on top of him now, losing its outline in the darkness, growing larger as it joined with other shadows to become one terrible, formless mass.

      “I have no money!” His words rebounded hollowly.

      Out of the gloom, fingers like steel ropes clamped on his arm. Zeth-han screamed as his attacker’s bulk clarified and the amorphous shadow became a face made of darkness. Gaunt and wasted, it looked like a thing long dead.

      “No, please!” Zeth-han groaned. Pushing outward with his hand to fend off the attack, he struck the flesh of his attacker’s chest. The skin was rough and cold, and gave way along the edge of a ragged cavity—as though the thing’s heart had been torn out. For a moment, synchronicities reverberated in Zeth-han’s mind and in his bones, even while fear fractured his thoughts. He remembered something…a living heart. But the cold memories slipped past him without clarifying. Night roared in his ears.

      Zeth-han screamed again, thrashing out in a mindless panic, wanting to cut away the darkness and prove these events a nightmare. But though there was no awakening for him, there was reprieve. More by luck than design, the dagger he still clutched in his hand found the thing’s cold flesh and plunged into it. The impact was hard, but the blade penetrated to the hilt.

      As the dagger slipped from his fingers, Zeth-han was suddenly free. He staggered backward, hearing the heavy thud of his attacker’s body on the stones and dirt. Hysteria churned in his throat and choked him, the wall shifted under his weight, and his empty hands scraped on the rough bricks. The metallic ornament he always wore on his wrist felt heavy and dragged at him, as though compelling him to follow his attacker to the ground. He forced himself in the opposite direction.

      Long minutes passed before he escaped from the alley. He felt himself pulled back continually and had to fight for every step. His gimpy leg ached and his lungs were weak with exhaustion. Sweat dripped onto the damp road, as though the shadows were clinging to him. He glanced back once, but the alley was still.

      In that moment of peace, memory of the disembodied human heart returned—a heart found beating in a funereal coffer on the penal island of Reyad. He had tried to forget he’d ever seen that object, for thought of it drove ice into his gut. Now, rebelliously, his memory held up one nightmare from his past against another in the present. This creature lacked a heart—he had found a beating heart on Reyad. Could they be connected? But his mind revolted from the idea. Too many years had faded behind him for the terrible discoveries of those days to find some fearful culmination now. Desperately, he drove the revelation deep into the dark beneath memory. Once, he recalled, he had been a penal governor, a man of power afraid of no one. Now, every shadow was his enemy.

      He waited until he caught his breath, then got back on his feet and staggered for support against the wall on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare. An old sign there read ‘Telfith’s Mast’. Zeth-han looked into the night-sky for a hint of dawn.

      He feared he would not survive to see it.

      ii.

      Remis found herself within another’s body, a cold dead body that she could not control. It confined and oppressed her as it stepped through night-shadows, the damp of the streets stagnant at its feet. Now it had entered an alley, the brick expanse of walls to either side rough and dirty, abandoned to years of weathering. Remis…or the undead corpse she had become…leapt along the lanes, grabbing at the burning imprint that scored the air, the pain in its limbs driving them into fits of rage. But wherever the shape was when the corpse snatched at it—light before a darkened wall, glittering in a shaded doorway—it was gone as the thing reached the spot. It spun away like a fog-wisp before the corpse’s grasp. Each time it grabbed at emptiness, the creature cried out, silently, in mingled despair and anger.

      Then before it was a man whose eyes were